website design for nonprofits

Optimizing Your Nonprofit Website’s User Experience

September 27, 2021 By Anne Stefanyk

As a nonprofit marketing professional, you know the importance of growing your audience and connecting with as many supporters as possible. Volunteers, donors, and advocates are the individuals who drive your mission forward and provide it with critical support, whether monetary or otherwise.

Therefore, your nonprofit’s website should be designed so that anyone can access and browse it with ease. This allows prospective and current supporters to learn more about your organization and its mission and get involved in different initiatives such as fundraising or volunteering.

So, how can you achieve this goal and acquire new support using your website? By optimizing your user experience (UX)!

Your organization is supporter-focused in all other aspects of your marketing and fundraising strategy, and your website shouldn’t be any different. By improving your site’s UX, you can create a more satisfying, enjoyable experience for users, which can lead to greater supporter engagement. Let’s get started!

What is User Experience?

User experience is the way that individuals interact with your website. It captures every action they take, from the moment supporters click on your website link to when they exit the site.

You can assess your website’s current UX status by reviewing website analytics, including your website’s bounce rate. The bounce rate of your site is the number of users who click on your website and immediately leave rather than clicking on other pages.

If you’re seeing a high bounce rate, it might indicate that your site isn’t doing much to intrigue or captivate users after they click on it. Luckily, you can boost your UX by implementing a few best practices.

8 Best Practices to Optimize Your Website’s UX

You may be able to implement these tips even if your organization doesn’t have a website expert on staff. However, partnering with a professional website design firm can give your organization access to professional advice and guidance. This might be the right investment if your website requires a major overhaul or includes a large quantity of data to sift through.

1. Design your website with the supporter journey in mind.

The donor journey is the process your prospective donors take from when they first discover your organization to when they eventually decide to donate and become long-term supporters of your mission. The steps of the donor journey include:

Awareness: Audience members become aware of your organization through your website, social media, word-of-mouth advertising, printed materials, or other sources.
Research: Individuals learn more about your nonprofit and start deciding if and how they’ll support your cause. They typically conduct this investigation using digital resources like your website.
Decision: Prospects decide whether or not to take a certain action, such as donating, signing up for your newsletter, or registering for a volunteer opportunity.
Appreciation: Your organization shows its gratitude for the supporters’ involvement.
Repeat: The supporter journey doesn’t end with one gift or volunteer opportunity. Your organization should dedicate ongoing stewardship efforts to ensure long-term support.

Your nonprofit’s website can play a role in optimizing every step of the supporter journey. For instance, consider how you can design your site so that someone who’s just heard about you for the first time can quickly find the information they need to understand your history and mission. Or, figure out how you can offer convenient, easy donation opportunities for supporters who’ve decided to take the leap in the decision phase and contribute funds.

Ultimately, you should design your website based on your supporters’ points of view. This will ensure the site is poised to facilitate audience members through the supporter journey quickly and efficiently. Keep this in mind as we explore the remaining best practices.

2. Reduce the page load speed.

Research has shown that 40% of people will leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load. The longer your website takes to load, the more quickly visitors will abandon your site, contributing to a high bounce rate.

To reduce your website’s load time, you should:

Compress any large images.
Enable browser caching so users won’t have to wait for the entire webpage to reload upon each visit.
Minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML (remove unnecessary spaces, commas, letters, and other extraneous elements to reduce file sizes).

This is a step where the assistance of a web development professional may come in handy, depending on your organization’s level of expertise. Reducing your website’s load time is an easy, straightforward way to encourage visitors to stay on your site for longer.

3. Incorporate engaging visual elements.

Internet users are constantly on the move and want to receive information as quickly and efficiently as possible. They don’t have the patience to wade through massive amounts of text on your website to find the information they need.

Sometimes, it’s more effective to show your visitors what they need to know, rather than telling them. Compelling images and infographics can provide this need for instant information by showing your mission in action.

For instance, if your organization is dedicated to saving endangered dolphin populations, you likely have a mission page on your website that describes why your organization exists and what you do to support endangered dolphins. You can make this mission more real to website visitors by including photos of the dolphins themselves and volunteers cleaning up waterways.

You can also create infographics that break your mission and history down into a series of statistics or informational snippets that give prospective supporters the background they need without having to read a lengthy post on the subject.

These visual elements can spark an emotional or intellectual connection in prospects, which can lead to them deciding to get further involved.

4. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly.

According to Double the Donation’s nonprofit statistics page, half of all nonprofit website traffic last year came from mobile and tablet users. The share of desktop-based traffic actually decreased by 9% compared to the previous year.

This means that designing your nonprofit’s website to be mobile-friendly is more important than ever. This post recommends a few strategies to make your website shine on mobile, including:

Reduce cluttersuch as overly detailed descriptions or irrelevant explanations.
Replace some text with photos where possible.
Make your donation button stick out by making it large and using a bright, eye-catching color.

Assess each page of your website in the mobile view to ensure there aren’t any formatting issues.

5. Adhere to accessibility guidelines.

Website accessibility means that your website is easily navigable for all users, no matter their disability. As a nonprofit, your website should align with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to ensure your organization is inclusive and accepting of all people.

Accessibility guidelines include requirements such as:

Ensuring your website can be navigated using a keyboard.
Ensuring a strong contrast between your background and foreground colors so all text is easily readable.
Including alternative text for images and scripts for videos.
Organizing your text structure so it can easily be read by screen readers.

Enhancing the accessibility of your website improves the user experience for all users. Accessible sites are clean, organized, and efficiently designed, meaning all users can peruse your content without facing any formatting or readability issues.

6. Implement strategic calls to action.

As visitors read your website’s about page, blog, and impact statements, they move closer to the decision phase where they’re contemplating whether or not to donate to your mission. It’s your organization’s job to make it as easy as possible for supporters to give as soon as the inspiration or motivation strikes.

Facilitate convenient, easy giving opportunities by placing strategic calls to action throughout your website. W ebsite design strateg ists recommend placing your donation buttons in a prominent location, such as within your website’s top navigation bar. This ensures users will be able to see the button no matter where they are on your website.

Also, include a link to your online donation form at the end of your blog posts or impact reports. This reminds visitors that they can play a direct role in your organization’s ability to help the community or cause.

7. Streamline your online donation page.

Even if visitors click on your online donation page, that doesn’t mean you’ve automatically secured their donation. Your online giving page should be streamlined and well-designed to serve as an effective fundraising tool that drives donations for your cause.

There are plenty of ways to make your donation form more user-friendly, including:

Cutting any unnecessary form fields to make the giving process faster.
Offering suggested giving amounts so supporters don’t have to spend time debating how much they should contribute.
Accepting multiple payment methods so donors can choose the method they prefer.

Remember that some supporters haven’t completely made their minds up about donating when they reach your online giving page. Include a brief explanation of why your organization conducts fundraising and what the gifts are used for to help persuade any visitors who are still on the fence.

8. Track your website data.

Frequently review your website analytics to determine the most successful elements and those that could be improved. For instance, explore Google Analytics to determine metrics such as your bounce rate, session duration (how long each user stays on your site), average time on page, page views, and more. These stats can help you determine your most and least popular web pages.

Then, conduct A/B testing to enhance your website pages. A/B testing involves creating two slightly different versions of the same web page and determining which is more effective for engaging users or driving conversions.

You might use A/B testing to assess the effectiveness of your website’s donate buttons or online giving page.

You can also use your online giving form to track donor data through your website. You can keep track of popular donation amounts, your most active donors, or popular donation days of the week.

Wrapping Up

Implementing these UX design changes can yield multiple benefits to your organization. You can increase your supporter satisfaction with your website while driving more users to complete donations. Plus, you can boost interaction with your non-donation opportunities, such as volunteer experiences or events.

We recommend taking a continuous improvement approach to your website’s user experience. Kanopi’s website maintenance guide defines continuous improvement as “making small improvements to your site on a consistent schedule.” This strategy ensures that you won’t be forced to complete a major website overhaul every few years when the state of your website becomes inadequate.

Remember to keep the supporter journey front and center while designing your website. These individuals are critical for your organization’s success, and by prioritizing their experience, you can secure long-term support for your cause. Good luck!

4 Reasons to Consider a Nonprofit Specific CMS

August 9, 2021 By Murad Bushnaq

Whether you’re new to the nonprofit world or you’ve been a nonprofit professional for quite some time, you’re probably aware that it’s nearly impossible to accomplish your mission without a strong online presence.

That’s where your website comes in. Your nonprofit’s website is the anchor of your digital strategy. One that’s well designed serves as an important fundraising tool, empowers you to communicate with your supporters, and represents your organization’s brand on the web.

Creating a great website starts with selecting a website builder, also known as a content management system (CMS). You could opt for a popular open source platform (like WordPress) that’s well-known and offers familiar editing tools. However, it’s well worth your while to consider website builders designed specifically for nonprofits.

Why? Here’s our answer: A nonprofit specific CMS comes equipped with the specific features your nonprofit needs to raise funds, connect with supporters, avoid website hiccups, and succeed in the long run.

In this post, we’ll give you four reasons why you should consider a nonprofit specific CMS, including:

Ease into website building with an intuitive interface.
Accept donations directly on your website.
Manage events from your website.
Utilize intranet and private page capabilities.

Your organization’s website is a tool meant to work for you, not to make it more difficult to manage your online presence. The reality is that some CMS providers just aren’t equipped to provide nonprofits with all the tools they need, requiring you to put in lots of effort to make the site work. That’s why choosing a nonprofit specific CMS will help your organization thrive in the long run.

Ease into website building with an intuitive interface.

You probably didn’t go into nonprofit work because you’re a tech-savvy coder, and neither did your staff members. A CMS that was designed specifically for nonprofit professionals keeps that in mind and offers a website builder that’s easy to use. That means you won’t have to spend hours getting any special training to design a perfect website.

With a nonprofit specific CMS, you’ll have an easier time with the following:

Making changes directly to your live pages with front-end editing tools.
Sizing, shaping, and moving images to the desired locations.
Adding dynamic page layouts using templates and widgets.
Publishing and sharing blog posts.

Also, the right CMS will provide you with plenty of support as you move through the process of creating your nonprofit’s website. From training for your staff to offering you access to a dedicated support team, you’ll never be on your own when you have questions about how to make your website work.

Another great thing about a CMS built for nonprofits is that providers understand that you want your website to be a one-stop shop for everything your organization does. That’s why they make it incredibly easy to incorporate the right widgets for collecting donations, managing events, and setting up intranet and private pages, all of which we’ll cover in the following sections.

Accept donations directly on your website.

Your donation page is arguably one of the most important parts of your website. According to 360MatchPro’s top nonprofit fundraising statistics, 63% of donors in the U.S. and Canada prefer to give online using a credit or debit card.

Since a majority of your donations will be flowing in through your website, why not make the experience more user friendly? Choose a CMS that allows you to create a donation page right on your website.

According to Morweb’s list of tips for donation page design, there are a few advantages to having control over your design, such as:

You can create a simple, easy-to-use donation form. The right CMS will give you the flexibility to create a donation form that donors will actually complete. When you have complete control over the design, you can implement best practices such as reducing the number of required fields that donors need to fill out, asking only for necessary information, condensing your donation appeal, and optimizing for accessibility and mobile use.

You can brand your donation page so that it matches the rest of your website. Donors don’t like to feel like they’ve been kicked over to a third-party donation page that seems disconnected from your organization. That makes the donating experience feel sterile, and the page might seem untrustworthy to donors, even if it isn’t. Make sure your donation form uses familiar images, colors, and logos that donors associate with your nonprofit.

You can offer multiple ways to give. Donors may want to give using a credit card, debit card, or PayPal. You can build your form so that it offers these options. Additionally, you can include suggested giving amounts and a recurring donation option, which makes giving now and giving in the future easier on the donor.

Having control over what your donation page actually looks like allows you to step into your donors’ shoes and do everything you can to ensure that their giving experience goes smoothly. Designing your donation page on a nonprofit specific CMS will eliminate the need for you to follow the complicated steps of creating a form with a generic or open-source platform.

Manage events from your website.

It’s no secret that nonprofits of every size encounter fundraising challenges. And one of the most challenging but necessary methods of fundraising is hosting a fundraising event.

Between managing registration, marketing the opportunity, and sharing results with your supporters, there are many points in the event planning process where your team can get overwhelmed. Even when you don’t have to worry about catering or selecting a venue, online events can cause stress, especially if you’re dealing with frustrating technical difficulties on top of running the event. Luckily, managing the event from your CMS can help you stay organized and on schedule so that you’re ready well before the day of the event.

Instead of letting stress be the norm during event planning, invest in a CMS designed for nonprofits that offers dedicated event management tools. You’ll be able to create a specific page for the event on your website so that site visitors won’t have to go far to learn about the event. That means your branding can carry over to your event page, which will make your organization look more professional and consistent. You can also manage participant registration and ticket purchases.

Keeping everything for your event centralized on your website will set you up for fundraising success and help you connect with supporters who already use your website to make donations or find volunteer opportunities.

Utilize intranet and private page capabilities.

Most nonprofits need a CMS with a password-protected intranet network that can keep some sensitive website content secure. This is useful for staff, volunteers, and members who need access to private content, like member directories or restricted resources.

Through a nonprofit specific CMS, you should be able to keep certain parts of your site secure by doing the following:

Approve or deny account registrations
Grant specific individuals access to particular pages or parts of the site
Organize PDFs, documents, and multimedia in a protected and searchable database

On top of the extra precautions your CMS puts in place, an important part of keeping your website secure is being proactive in encouraging users to do their part. You’ll want to regularly remind your users to update their passwords and make sure those passwords meet certain requirements. You might also consider requiring a two-factor authentication sign-in process, so you can always verify your users’ identities.

Keeping private information secure is important to the health of your organization. When your supporters know they can trust you with their contact information on a member directory or their payment information on a registration form, they’ll continue to see you as a reputable nonprofit that they want to be involved with.

The Gist

One of the common mistakes nonprofit leaders make is purchasing nonoptimal software solutions for their organization, like a CMS that isn’t built for nonprofits. Investing in a nonprofit specific CMS can make your job easier, allowing you to manage all of your organization’s operations from one platform without having to be a technical expert in all things code.

Plus, the right CMS frees up time in your organization that you can spend fundraising and furthering your cause, so it’s well worth pursuing. Now is the time to start discussing your nonprofit’s specific website needs with your team so that you can select the perfect CMS for your organization.

5 Online Donation Form Mistakes Your Nonprofit Should Avoid

August 9, 2021 By Matt Dunne

Though the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many challenges for fundraisers, it has also created opportunities for nonprofits like yours to assess virtual fundraising efforts and learn how to use important online tools more effectively. One of those tools is your donation form, which is a critical component of your fundraising.

Unfortunately, many times nonprofits aren’t aware of the mistakes they’re making when it comes to donation forms. Some organizations think that simply creating a generic form and throwing it on a website is enough to ensure that fundraising dollars will come streaming in. Really, though, this just means they’re fumbling an opportunity to, as this article on donation forms by iATS Payments puts it, “receive the generous gift and…[collect] vital supporter information.”

In reality, raising money for your cause isn’t that easy, and it’s even harder if you’re making mistakes with your donation form without knowing it. In this post, we’ll walk you through five common mistakes nonprofits often make with donation forms so you’re no longer in the dark:

Not making your form easy to find.
Using an insecure payment processor.
Asking unnecessary questions.
Not making your form accessible.
Not providing multiple ways for donors to engage.

Along with these things to avoid, we’ll also give you some tips on how you should build your donation form.

As you work to ensure your donation form is the best it can be, remember to put yourself in your donors’ shoes and think through what they need from your form so their giving experience goes smoothly. By simplifying the process for donors, you’ll be signalling to them that when they have money to give, your organization is the one to give to.

Let’s jump in!

Mistake #1: Not making your form easy to find.

Some experts say you only have 7 seconds to grab your website visitors’ attention. That means you definitely can’t afford to bury your donation form deep in your website and then cross your fingers and hope donors will find it. Instead, try implementing these four best practices for making sure your supporters can find your form quickly and easily:

Embed your donation form onto your site on a specific donation page. Sometimes a donation form hosted through a third-party site can look suspicious and untrustworthy to a donor, even if it isn’t. Avoid this problem by embedding your donation form right onto your site. This way, the experience of donating will feel more connected to your nonprofit as a whole, as the branding of the donation page and donation form will look familiar. Plus, you’ll keep your donors on your website longer, setting them up for further online engagement with your organization.

Create an eye-catching button on your main menu that can direct your site visitors to your donation page. Placing a button in your menu will prevent your donors from having to dig through multiple pages on your site just looking for the donation page. Your button should stand out from the rest of the options on your menu so that it catches your donors’ attention.

Use calls-to-action throughout your website that link to your donation page. A call-to-action is simply a statement that encourages someone to complete a task. You can include calls-to-action on your website in the form of buttons or brightly colored text links that can take your supporters to your donation page. Make sure these calls-to-action are well worded. For example, “Join the fight to save our oceans!” is a much better call-to-action than “Donate now.”

Link directly to your donation page on your marketing materials when you can. Decrease the chances that donors will get lost along the way to your donation form. If, for example, you encourage donors to give in an email newsletter or social media post, link directly to your donation page so your donors don’t have to search your website for it.

The main takeaway here is that locating your donation form should be easy for a prospective donor. Don’t make them work to find it, or you might lose them along the way, which means you’re not only missing out on a donation but an opportunity to cultivate a lasting relationship with a supporter.

Mistake #2: Using an insecure payment processor.

When a donor gives to your organization, they’re entrusting you with a lot of sensitive information, including their name, address, credit card or bank account routing number, and other information. If you haven’t invested in a secure payment processor, you’re putting your donors’ personal data at risk and staking your organization’s reputation on the off-chance that you won’t experience a major data breach.

Don’t be careless with your donors’ data. Instead, invest in a nonprofit payment processing tool that is dedicated and secure. Here are some things to look for when considering which payment processor is right for your organization:

Integration with your donation page and form: Keep the donation process simple by integrating your payment processor with your donation form and putting all data in one place.

Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance: The PCI standards are a set of guidelines created to protect credit card users when they pay online. Choose a processor that follows these guidelines.

Acceptance of all major types of payments: Ensure that as many people as possible can use your donation form by accepting credit cards, debit cards, and ACH payments.

Protective measures for your payments: The best payment processors will allow you to customize your security features and give you access to fraud alerts, encryption and tokenization.

Payment verification: Your processor should also offer a card verification code requirement capability (CVV2) and an address verification system (AVS) so you can investigate abnormally small or large donation amounts.

It might be tempting to view data security as trivial or unnecessary, but in reality, the security of your payment processor can greatly affect your relationship with your donors and your fundraising success, so it’s something to take seriously. Choosing a secure payment processor will help to set your website up as an effective fundraising tool and give you peace of mind as you collect donors’ payment information.

Mistake #3: Asking unnecessary questions.

Even with a secure payment processor, your donors will be wary of your donation form if it asks for too much information. For example, some donation forms ask for unnecessary information like middle name or country of residence , either by default or because of poor planning. And while form fields like these may seem harmless, they might also be working against you.

Asking unnecessary questions in your donation form can negatively affect your supporters’ donating experience in two ways:

Donors may see your donation form as untrustworthy and think it’s taking too much of their information and decide not to donate.
If there are too many questions to answer or fields to fill out, donors may think the form will take too long to fill out and abandon their transaction altogether.

To avoid these two problems, work with your team to identify what exactly you need to know about your donors. After all, you do need some information so you can contact your donors, set goals specific to them, and create effective marketing materials catered to certain demographics. But other information is just flat out unimportant to your operations.

Aim to request only necessary bits of information, like names, addresses, contact information, payment information, and maybe helpful information that won’t seem too invasive to a donor, like preferred method of contact or how they heard about your nonprofit. Other non-essential questions can be marked “not required,” but still, you should limit those non-essential questions to just a few. And in most situations, remember that if you’re in doubt, you should probably leave it out.

Mistake #4: Not making your form accessible.

Another common mistake nonprofits make when designing donation forms is not considering all donors’ needs. This includes thinking of people of all abilities or people who use mobile devices. When your donation form isn’t designed with all your potential donors in mind, you risk not being able to connect with all the people who care about your cause.

Here are two tips so that you can reach all of your donors and meet their needs:

Ensure your donation page is in compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines include using a high contrast ratio, easy-to-read fonts, closed captioning and transcripts on multimedia elements, and alt-text on images for individuals who may be navigating your website with a screen reader.

Optimize your donation page for mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile ensures that if your donors are looking at your donation page on a phone or tablet, the formatting, images, and text will all be readable.

Being mindful of every potential donor will help your organization create lasting relationships with everyone who supports your mission. Plus, when you make your donation page and form accessible to all, you’ll get a reputation boost for being inclusive and thoughtful of your entire supporter base.

Mistake #5: Not providing multiple ways for donors to engage.

Collecting a one-time donation from a supporter is certainly helpful for your nonprofit, but finding ways to increase their engagement for the long-term will benefit your nonprofit even more.

One way you can encourage supporters to engage with your organization on multiple levels is to use your donation form to offer different opportunities for engagement. These might include:

Adding a matching gift database so donors can see if their employer participates in donation matching. According to 360MatchPro’s guide to matching gift databases, an estimated $4-$7 billion of matching gift funds goes unclaimed each year. This is mostly due to the fact that donors are unaware of their employers’ participation. An embedded searchable database can help solve that problem and give donors the chance to boost their donation right as they’re filling out your form.

Offer a recurring monthly donation option. Many donors would give on a consistent monthly basis if only their chosen organization made it easy for them. You can offer the option for donors within your form to turn their donation into a monthly gift, making it so they are billed monthly without having to put their payment information into your form each time they want to give.

Giving suggested donation amounts. Suggested donation amounts prompt your donors to give more. For example, when a donor navigates to your donation form intending to give $5 and then sees suggested amounts of $10, $20, or $50, they’ll be more likely to increase their donation. Plus, suggested giving amounts are easy to select and provide an element of social proof, meaning they signal to your donor what is a typical or normal amount to give.

Include an opportunity for donors to opt-in to email communication from your organization. Donors who care often want to be involved in other opportunities, like your planned giving or volunteer programs. Give them the chance to learn more about these opportunities by letting them opt-in to email communication from your nonprofit.

Giving your donors more information about how they can engage with your organization will help you to find the “super” supporters in your donor base who can really help push your cause forward. Create your donation page with these opportunities in mind so you can identify those individuals who want to cultivate a relationship with your organization.

Many nonprofit organizations neglect their donation pages only to see a slump in donations. By avoiding these five mistakes and working hard to optimize your donation form, you can become an organization that consistently retains donors and fosters lasting relationships with supporters. Get started today by working with your team to create a donation form that donors actually want to use. Good luck!

Using Your Nonprofit Website as a Fundraising Tool: 4 Tips

April 5, 2021 By Ira Horowitz

Your nonprofit’s website serves as the central hub of your nonprofit’s online presence. It hosts your mission statement and information about your programs, enables supporters to get in touch with your organization, and allows potential supporters to organically find your nonprofit online.

Your nonprofit’s website can also be leveraged as a fundraising tool in your marketing campaigns. Most fundraising campaigns focus on connecting with supporters on other platforms such as social media, email, and even traditional mail. Potential donors are already on those channels and your marketing outreach aims to bring them to your website.

Your website is a core component of your marketing strategy for your digital fundraising campaigns, and can be leveraged to improve your fundraising campaign’s strategy with these four tips:

Optimize Your Donation Page
Connect to Social Media
Create a Brand Identity
Include Interactive Media

These strategies will improve your website’s functionality, design, and content to raise engagement rates, improve donor retention, and make donating more convenient. As you implement improvements, track your donation and interaction rates to understand how your changes impact your campaign. Your data will provide insight as to which choices had positive results and what needs to be refined further. With that in mind, let’s jump in.

1. Optimize Your Donation Page

Supporters who reach your donation page are at a critical point in their engagement with your nonprofit. At this point, your supporters understand your nonprofit’s mission and are considering donating to the cause. However, donors can still be deterred as some will abandon their donation forms before ever completing their gift.

To avoid donation form abandonment, create an easier, more convenient donation experience for your supporters by optimizing your donation page to encourage both completed and recurring donations. Here are several strategies you can apply to your donation page to convert donors:

Making sure your donation page is easy to find. Many nonprofits have a donate button visible on their homepage and header, while others embed their donation page directly into their homepage or even on top of their banner or hero image. Your supporters should never be confused about how to access your donation page, so ensure navigation is as easy as possible by providing clear links that direct supporters to your donation form in as few clicks as possible.

Asking only necessary questions. You should ask your donors questions in addition to their payment information such as their contact information and gift amount. However, too many required information fields, especially when they seem unnecessary, can result in donors deciding the form isn’t worth their time. Limit your form to a single page and keep your questions relevant to the immediate donation in order to respect your donors’ time and quickly secure their contribution.

Offering additional engagement opportunities. Many of your donors are interested in supporting your nonprofit beyond their first donation, but you have to give them the option to do so. Offering them further opportunities such as becoming a recurring donor or checking to see if they qualify for a matching gift. After they make their donation, ask donors if they would like to opt-in to receive additional messages about your nonprofit’s activities to stay in touch.

While not directly supporting your fundraising, always take care to ensure your donation form and payment processor are secure. Supporters may not be wowed into donating by knowing your website is secure, but they will feel more at ease when giving out their financial information. Not to mention, protecting your nonprofit and your donors against data breaches will help build trust and your reputation as a reliable organization.

2. Connect to Social Media

Social media is likely one of your key fundraising tools as you’re able to reach supporters on the platforms they already frequent. Your social media profiles and posts should link to your website to drive traffic, but your website can also enhance your social media outreach and engagement.

Your website will be many supporters’ first impression of your nonprofit, but it’s often updated less frequently than your social media profiles. By strategically connecting your social media profiles to your nonprofit, you can present your nonprofit as active, modern, and worthy of donations. In addition to providing links on both your website and social media profiles to drive traffic between the platforms, consider:

Integrating your social media feeds. A regularly updated news page on your website shows supporters that your nonprofit is active and consistently making progress toward your mission. However, in addition to creating a series of blog posts to keep supporters up-to-date, you can integrate your social media feeds onto your website so supporters can see what you’re up to on other platforms. This will encourage supporters to engage with you on multiple channels, while also saving your team the time and effort of updating both your accounts and your news page with major updates.

Running social media fundraisers. Social media fundraisers, particularly Facebook fundraisers, are started and managed by supporters raising funds on behalf of your mission. Some nonprofits shy away from social media fundraisers as they have less control over the outcomes. However, as GoodUnited’s guide to Facebook fundraisers points out, while you may have limited control, these initiatives have the potential to raise a lot of funding as supporters encourage friends and family to give. You can support these fundraisers by publishing advice or instructions on your website to encourage supporters to maximize these fundraisers.

Engaging in peer-to-peer fundraising. Peer-to-peer fundraisers often also leverage social media as your supporters fundraise on your nonprofit’s behalf. However, these campaigns differ from social media fundraisers as your team starts and manages the campaigns. While most of the outreach you and your supporters conduct happens on social media, your website hosts your supporters’ peer-to-peer fundraising pages, making it the core of your campaign.

You might hesitate to direct traffic away from your website by linking to social media, but you shouldn’t treat your social media profiles and your website as if they are competing with one another. Instead, consider the strengths and marketing opportunities of both to create a cohesive strategy that builds momentum towards your fundraising goal and provides multiple points of engagement.

3. Create a Brand Identity

Your nonprofit’s brand should be apparent to any visitor as soon as they open your website’s homepage. Create a brand style guide so all messaging and external communication consistently features your nonprofit’s brand. Your website should follow your style guidelines, but keep in mind that it is also where many supporters will first familiarize themselves with your brand, making its representation of your brand particularly memorable.

Your website’s design should support your brand, making it more memorable for visitors while conveying additional information about your nonprofit’s mission and approach. For example, as Cornershop Creative’s guide to some of the best nonprofit websites showcases, your brand is more than just your logo, color scheme, and tagline.

Cornershop Creative’s guide shares this example from Sharsheret’s website to discuss how nonprofits can cement their brand identity with key visual elements:

This homepage makes use of images, particularly its hero image, to visually demonstrate its mission’s focus and invoke emotion in supporters. The hero image has a blurred background, drawing attention to the figure in focus, the woman who has been affected by breast cancer. The use of color, blurred images, and expression of the person in the photo create a sense of peace and trust that an organization focused on medical support would likely want to instill its supporters.

Visitors to this website will remember the magenta color (which stands out more due to being contrasted with the green of the donation button and hero image), the logo prominently displayed in the upper left hand corner, and their mission to support women.

As this example shows, your brand and website design should have a specific design goal. Outside of being memorable, consider what images and ideas you want to associate your brand with. As you can often only fit your logo and key colors onto external marketing documents, your website provides invaluable space to explore and reaffirm your brand identity with supporters.

4. Include Interactive Media

You can further engage supporters to support your fundraiser by providing interactive media on your website such as petitions, maps, and more. WordPress plugins can enhance your website’s fundraising potential by creating user-friendly and responsive features that prompt supporter engagement.

As with your other design elements, choose plugins that match your nonprofit’s fundraising goals by acting in service to a specific objective. For example, if you’re seeking volunteers for a major upcoming fundraiser, you may include a pop-up calling for volunteers that appears after supporters submit their donation form.

Interactive media and plugins both require proper maintenance to remain reliable sources of engagement. Any visual media can break or slow down loading times, so schedule regular checks of your media links into your website maintenance process. Installing updates when they become available can help your nonprofit stay on top of bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Plugins require additional research to ensure they are secure, reliable, and also won’t slow down your website. Before installing a plugin, check its recent updates and reviews to ensure the developer is still maintaining it and the plugin is legitimate. You can also use online resources like this one to find reliable and up-to-date plugins designed specifically for nonprofit websites.

If you need additional help creating interactive media or integrating plugins, reach out to a nonprofit website builder or design agency. These consultants have years of experience assisting nonprofits setup and optimize their websites, which means they are likely to have the solution for any coding errors or other technical issues preventing your website from reaching its full potential.

Fundraising campaigns are most effective when they’re supported by their nonprofit’s website. While you might see your website primarily as an informational tool, it also has the potential to raise awareness, encourage donations, and invite continued engagement with supporters interested in donating.

Creating Donation Pages that Convert: 5 Pro Tips

October 7, 2020 By Ryan Ozimek

As we round out a hectic year and look ahead to new challenges and opportunities, it’s worth it to take some time to review the fundamentals and look for small, iterative changes that can yield big results over the next year.

While many nonprofits consider donor engagement and retention to be their biggest pain points, you also have to consider how you’re securing those supporters in the first place.

For a nonprofit, the foundation of all your fundraising strategies is your donation page.

Small issues with your organization’s online donation page can have major effects on your ability to convert visitors into donors, measured by your donation conversion rate. A poor conversion rate means that not many of the visitors who find their way to your donation page actually feel motivated to follow through with making a gift. That’s a serious issue, and it’s one that many nonprofits aren’t even aware is holding them back.

That’s why creating a stronger, high-converting donation page is especially important as we head into the year-end giving season and Giving Tuesday. You definitely don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to secure donations from the higher volume of visitors that organizations typically see around this time.

That being said, let’s walk through a few pro tips for strengthening your donation page and boosting conversions:

Start with an integrated donation app.
Keep your design simple and mobile-optimized.
Create multiple donation pages and conduct A/B tests.
Use suggested donation tiers to drive revenue.
Create campaign-specific donation pages.

With online-only engagement the new norm for most organizations, your donation page shouldn’t stand between your nonprofit and increased support! These tips are great starting places to begin seeing improvements in your own conversion rate. Let’s dive in.

1 Start with an integrated donation app.

Software integrations are extremely valuable for nonprofits. Their benefits include saving your team’s time and generating data that you can use to improve your fundraising and marketing strategies.

Most importantly, integrations between your donation page, website, and database or CRM give you increased visibility into how your donation page is performing. Without a clear sense of the number of visitors landing on your donation page and completing transactions, you can’t gauge your conversion rate or begin making data-driven improvements.

Using donation software that integrates with your other tools will be your best bet. If you’re working with a cloud-based, modular-style CRM platform like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, use a donation app that’s specifically designed to integrate with those systems.

With data automatically flowing from your donation app to your database (and coupled with website data through Google Analytics), you’ll get a complete picture of your donation page’s performance over time. This gives you a solid foundation on which to begin making improvements.

2. Keep your design simple and mobile-optimized.

The design of your donation page can play a major role in how well it converts donors. Simple, intuitive design that doesn’t slow users down is key. Avoid elements like:

Too many images or distracting multimedia
Multiple pages a donor needs to click through in order to complete a donation
Unnecessary fields or required account creation

Any of these elements will slow down your donors when they’re feeling most motivated to give. Make the process as fast and seamless as possible to avoid deterring any potential support.

As an added bonus, simpler designs typically work much better on mobile devices than complicated pages. Mobile-optimization is critical today with more and more web traffic occurring on mobile devices. If your donation page doesn’t work well (or at all!) on smaller screens, you’re almost certainly losing out on potential donations.

Additionally, the ability to customize and tweak the design of your donation page is a must. This is one reason why payment processing services like PayPal that serve very general needs often aren’t the best choice for nonprofit organizations. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our Soapbox guide to Venmo and PayPal alternatives for nonprofits.

3. Create multiple donation pages and conduct A/B tests.

To fine-tune one or more elements of your donation page, we recommend creating multiple versions and conducting A/B tests. Let’s say you want to see which text appeal is more effective at converting donors. Here’s how you’d find out:

Create two versions of your donation page, each with a different message encouraging visitors to make a transaction. One might emphasize how their support will directly impact your mission, and the other might emphasize why their support is so important for your nonprofit amid today’s challenges. Leading donation software should allow you to easily create and customize additional donation pages as needed.
Promote both donation pages to your supporters online via email or social media. Try sending an email that links to one donation page, and then following up with a separate email linking to the other donation page after a week or two.
Review how each page performed. Integrated donation software should make it easy to identify how many visitors and donations each page secured. Make note of these insights, and use them to make updates to your other donation pages over time.

This is a fairly simple example, but A/B testing is an invaluable tool for improving nearly every aspect of your donation page. By strengthening your text appeals, visual design, suggested donation tiers, and more, you can build a high-converting donation page one element at a time.

Even beyond your donation page, A/B testing is an important tactic to have in your arsenal. Use this technique to improve all the elements of your broader digital strategy, like your nonprofit’s marketing materials.

4. Use suggested donation tiers to drive revenue.

Peer pressure and the power of persuasion can be extremely effective for boosting donation conversions. Make sure your donation page includes pre-set suggested donation tiers for donors to consider (in addition to the option to set their own preferred amount).

Use your past donation data to find your average donation amount. Then, build tiers around it, encouraging donors to go just a bit higher. Suggesting an amount makes the donation process even simpler for donors, and highlighting your average donation amount can persuade some visitors to give more than they would have otherwise.

This is an easy way to drive more revenue with very little extra effort, so it’s important to have suggested donation tiers on your pages. This is especially true when you want to maximize revenue during time-bound campaigns and high-volume giving days.

Plus, suggesting donation amounts is a great opportunity to show donors the specific impacts of their gifts. For instance, a gift of a certain amount might buy X number of school supplies for a child or help feed an animal in need for X days. Visualizing the concrete impact of their support is a surefire way to motivate more donors to give.

5. Create campaign-specific donation pages.

By creating separate donation pages for your nonprofit’s various fundraising campaigns, you can put all of these tips and your insights from A/B tests into action.

Giving Tuesday is the perfect example. Create a dedicated donation page specifically for your Giving Tuesday campaign, and link supporters to it in all of your promotional emails, social media posts, and blog posts leading up to the big day. This allows you to target every element of your donation page, like its design, text, and follow-up messages, to that particular campaign.

Plus, creating campaign-specific donation pages drastically simplifies the process of tracking each campaign’s performance. When integrated with your database, transaction and engagement data from each page will be properly reported under the appropriate campaign.

As we round out a whirlwind of a year and look ahead to the year-end giving season, strengthening your nonprofit’s core fundraising foundation is a great use of your time.

As the anchor of all of your online fundraising efforts, your donation pages must pull their weight! There’s no reason why nonprofits should endure poor conversion rates when simple, iterative fixes like the ones in these tips can be easily implemented. Plus, incorporating best practices like software integrations and A/B testing into your regular fundraising approach will benefit your nonprofit well into the future. Best of luck!

Helping Nonprofits Squash Site Bugs

February 19, 2019 By Kirk Deis

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 or a bootstrapping startup every legitimate company needs a website – it’s their digital storefront. Managing your company site at times can be a costly move. The constant back and forth between your team and developers isn’t easy. Imagine if you’re in the nonprofit sector, leveraging revenue in the best ways can be challenging to say the least.

That’s why we’re excited to share an exclusive promo for Nonprofit Organization provided by The Bug Squasher.

The Bug Squasher is a tool designed for freelancers, developers, site owners, anyone who manages their website. It video records, annotates, tracks and reports site bugs.

Imagine something is broken on your site, instead of emailing, texting, and/or calling a developer to fix it, you can video record the problem and provide a backend report on information they need to diagnose the issue.

Here’s a demo created by a YouTuber: https://youtu.be/ZpIjZdW5JCg

The Nonprofit Offer To Help Squash Website Bugs:

The Bug Squasher Team is offering the first 100 Nonprofits in 2019 access to the platform for 6 Months at no cost.
To qualify for this offer you need to provide the following:

Proof you are 501c3 nonprofit ie 2-3 images of you and your team at work
Website URL of your Nonprofit
A short 5 sentence summary describing your cause
A short 5 sentence summary listing the impact your cause will have

Email the above to info@thebugsquasher.com with the subject line, “Nonprofit Here”

Rules/ Reminders:

This offer is only for the first 100 Nonprofits that reach out
It expires by 2020
The Bug Squasher reserve the right to deny any organizations ie if it appears information is missing or we are being misled or the organization supports negative causes.
When you share the information we will select a few organizations and write a blog about them and share on our website and social media.
You will be given access to The Bug Squasher

All we ask in return is for good causes big or small to reach out.

Happy Squashing!
–The Bug Squasher Team

Capital Campaign Websites: 9 Must-Haves

April 18, 2018 By Jason N. Smith

A stand-alone capital campaign website is a great way to supplement printed campaign materials and expand the reach and effectiveness of your effort.

The campaign website works alongside printed materials to broaden the reach and flexibility of campaign messaging. It also offers specialized functionality that makes raising funds easier.

When you consider that a capital campaign often loses up to 4% of gifts due to unfulfilled pledges, online giving becomes an attractive tool for reducing attrition.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to bring your campaign online. Just adding a section to your current site is not a wise move. The features and functions required will overwhelm your normal site—and your potential donors. A stand-alone site tailored to the distinctive needs of a capital campaign is the way to go.

Let’s take a look at the nine parts of a great capital campaign website:

1. The Plan

Include an online presentation of your plan, expanded to include information that would not fit in the brochure: additional copy, project renderings, floorplans, etc.

2. Progress Bar

A progress bar shows your goal (and challenge goal) and tracks progress towards (and above) those benchmarks. The progress bar should be activated only after your campaign kickoff, to show early success.

3. Q+A

A good Q+A answers common questions and responds rapidly to questions that may arise through the campaign. This keeps misinformation in check and ensures there is no uncertainty in the minds of donors.

4. Resources

This section provides planned giving information so that donors can consider creative giving options in addition to their cash pledge. A Resources section can also provide downloadable architect’s plans, a masterplan document, or other lengthy pdf files.

5. News

A news feature enables you to keep the campaign fresh by going into depth on particular aspects of the effort and by providing testimonials from key individuals, announcements of campaign milestones, and more.

6. Video

Many of your visitors will like to read about your plans. Others will appreciate a video. This is a great way to bring your plans to life and can be shared via email and elsewhere.

7. Gifts Table

The venerable gifts table shows the sizes and numbers of gifts required to make your campaign a success. Bring the gifts table online.

8. Gifts Calculator

A calculator enables donors to see that they are capable of giving more than they might have guessed when the gift is broken into smaller payments. Donors can enter a total pledge and see how much would be given on an ongoing basis to meet that commitment. Alternately, they can enter what their payments might be and see what their gifts would add up to—the total pledge. Those little payments over 3-5 years can really add up.

9. Pledge Form

A secure pledge form enables recurring online giving so that donors can pay digitally on a recurring basis, dramatically reducing pledge attrition and enabling online giving to more than pay for itself.

You now know the nine key content features for your capital campaign website. But how the site is programmed is also important. Here are a few things to consider:

Mobile-friendly: Your site needs to be built using responsive design so that it functions on smaller devices and serves the 20-40% of your audience viewing it from a smartphone.

Visually Consistent: While it is a different medium from printed materials, your site should share the same visual look and appear to be a natural extension of your other communications.

Secure: The site must be hosted securely to keep sensitive data safe and to reassure donors that you take their privacy seriously.

Easy to Update: A content management system allows administrators easy access to update the site and view gifts to keep the site fresh, keep campaign administrators informed, and reduce developer fees in the long run.

Easy to Maintain: Could you cobble together a pile of WordPress plugins to get the function you need? Maybe. But over the life of the campaign (3-5 years), plugin updates will occur that cause conflicts and feature failures. Troubleshooting those can take many hours and can lead to a bad experience for donors.

The GivingTools Solution

You have a number of options. You can:

Try to fit the above content in your current website.
Build a site from scratch that provides this function (will it be done before the campaign is over?).
Partner with a resource that provides capital campaign websites.

GivingTools provides a ready-made solution for capital campaign websites. Indeed, GivingTools is the only service that offers this. For a single fee (well under $1,000), GivingTools takes a pdf of your campaign materials and creates the entire site in just a few days. Secure hosting for 3-5 years is included at no extra cost. And if you want to allow online pledge payments, that can also be enabled, for just $14.95/month. That includes payments from banking accounts (ACH) for just 25 cents per payment…no percentages taken.

This resource makes creating your campaign site a piece of cake. You get a robust solution that meshes with your other communications and provides the convenience and power of online giving, all in a matter of a few days!

By planning on a capital campaign site, your campaign brochure can be a compelling overview that leads people to the site for more details. If a donor loses a pledge card (or wishes to make an additional commitment), it is simply a click away. And with online giving, unfulfilled pledges (3-4% of total pledges) can be dramatically reduced.

To see some examples of what a capital campaign site from GivingTools looks like, just visit givingtools.com. If done right, a dedicated capital campaign website can help maximize the success of your next capital effort.

Crucial Website Design Tips for Nonprofits

June 5, 2014 By Shaifali Gupta

According to the Nonprofit Handbook written by Gary M. Grobman, “a nonprofit organization (NPO) or not-for-profit organization is an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals rather than distributing them as profit or dividends”. In today’s time, a NPO just like commercial businesses, has to walk hand-in-hand with the latest technologies for dissemination of relevant information about themselves as well as about the cause they stand for. This undoubtedly starts with the right website.

Below are given the points not-to-be missed while designing an NPO website. These factors if taken care of will not only increase the chances of a NPO website being discovered on search engines and social media, but also would bring an influx of regular visitors and eventually volunteers/donors/personnel.

1. Let the website’s theme be ‘Compassion’: The foundation of any NPO lies in a cause they support. This could be literacy, environment, energy, education etc.

An NPO’s website foremost should clearly depict this cause and their mission statement.
Images/compelling videos/graphs/charts used on the website to educate people about their cause should be able to evoke compassion and compel the visitors to at least stay longer on the website.

2. Bring focus to the Cheerleaders: Any NPO website should bring out its cheerleaders before its readers and potential followers.

A section on the website should focus on the successful projects and events organized by the NPO.
Testimonials by industry leaders, donors and volunteers should be included in form of videos and text.
Profiles of key personnel, board of directors and industry- & market- giants associated with the NPO, should be a part of the website, under a separate section.
The companies that partner with the NPO or which support the NPO through sponsorships and funds, should be listed on the NPO’s website under ‘Partnerships’.

3. Be Inspirational: A big contribution to any nonprofit is from the numerous people who devote their time, effort and money. These volunteers usually resonate and relate to the mission of the NPO. Hence, their website should be volunteer-friendly.

The message from past volunteers should speak about the joy of volunteering. This would keep the existing base of volunteers motivated as well as would attract other people to come forward in any form they can.
The website should present different ways in which someone can volunteer with them. A separate page should be devoted mentioning these options, which readers can choose from and contribute according to their convenience.

4. Being Donor-philic: Any NPO is highly dependent on funds raised at various events or the generous donations by their donor base. It is of critical importance that their website asks for ‘Donation’ in very simple form. A few things to be remembered are given below-

The donation process should be a single-step. Just a click of button and the website visitor should be directed to the donation form.
The donation form should not ask for unnecessary and too much information (this may put off the interested donor).
The user should not be asked to create an account before he can donate.
After the donation, make the donor feel welcome and his donation should be appreciated by giving him a choice to share his generosity on social media profiles like Facebook/Twitter/Google+ etc. This would be the NPO’s way of thanking him as well as a way to pull more donors from his network.

5. Come across as Informational/educational: Any NPO website should be seen as a storehouse of information concerning the cause they support.

Have a ‘News/latest updates’ section where latest information from the concerned field can be flashed.
The news items or pieces of information can be elaborated on a blog post. This would make the audience keep returning to the website to keep themselves abreast as well as to learn more.
The NPO can have a forum where the queries of readers can be welcome and responded to. This would help the NPO establish itself as experts in their area.

6. Feel proud in being ‘Shareable’: The website as a whole and every page/post should have social media sharing buttons. This will increase followership as well as the visibility on search engines.

5. Be consistent in branding: Branding is all about having loyal followers. Any company/product/NPO becomes a brand after a series of regular and consistent marketing efforts.

The logos/fonts/colors used on the website should be consistent with the other promotional material used by the NPO. This would make it easily recognizable and also, will stay in memory longer.
The social media sharing buttons should be displayed in a way that they blend with the entire look and feel of the website.

6. Keep it simple & original: Originality and simplicity are the key to any website’s success.

Right from the textual content to the images/videos should be original. These should not be copied. Being original is the sign that the nonprofit is really concerned about the cause they support. Also, the photos should not be stock photos. More people donate to real pictures than to stock photos.
The website should not be cluttered with loads of information presented in bright colors. The look should be compassionate, professional and human.
The websites should always prominently display ‘Contact Us’ form, and wherever possible, a contact number should be given. Very often people prefer to give a quick call rather than writing a long email.